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New Scientist Live

Lost in space: Two books on the forgotten women of astroscience

Once upon a time “computers” were human, most were women, and come the 1950s some of them were black – and they were charting a path to the moon

By Manjit Kumar

Edward Pickering’s stellar calculators

Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge

ASSESSING the part women have played in the development of science is not easy. Historians must navigate by the documents available to them. Often, the best preserved information is financial. So inattentive writers tend to underestimate the contributions of women who achieved recognition from their peers while they were financially dependent on their families, like neurologist Cecilia Vogt or marine biologist Jeanne Villepreux-Power.

But if even intellectual celebrities get forgotten, is it any wonder that we forget the women whose contributions are hard to assess for other reasons?

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Roles and titles evolve, and some jobs that appear mundane to us were not so back then. Once upon a time, “computers” were human, and often female; but these women weren’t drudges. Two recent biographical histories explore the careers of the women who made modern astronomy and space science possible. Theirs were not easy lives by today’s standards, but they were not without light and shade, rewards and recognition.

“One calculator was a maid. She went on to discover 10 new stars and classify more than 10,000 stars”

Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe starts in Harvard College Observatory, where Edward Pickering was just 30 years old when he became director in 1877. He was fond of saying that “a magnifying glass will show more in the photograph than a powerful telescope will show in the sky”. It was an outlook that left a legacy of half a million photographic plates and some seminal discoveries.

Sobel describes each of these slices as “a little piece of heaven”, 8 inches by 10 inches, which together constituted a universe captured on glass. Men might have taken the photographs, but it was a remarkable and talented group of “computers” who analysed and decoded the information they contained.

Pickering, a champion of the new field of photometry, wanted to establish a stellar brightness scale based on observations of stars whose brightness varies over time. Two widowed heiresses, Catherine Wolfe Bruce and Anna Palmer Draper, provided the funds. Draper in particular wanted a catalogue of stellar spectra as a tribute to her husband, an accomplished stellar photographer.

Initially, female relatives of male observatory workers were employed as computers, but soon recruits included graduates from the fledgling women’s colleges. One remarkable calculator came from far humbler origins, however: Williamina Fleming was a maid hired by Pickering’s wife. Fleming’s natural abilities were quickly recognised. She went on to discover 10 stars, some 300 stars with variable brightness, and to classify more than 10,000 stars using a system that she devised herself. In 1899, she was appointed Harvard’s curator of astronomical photographs.

NASA mathematician Mary Jackson

NASA Langley Research Center

Two years later, Annie Jump Cannon became the first woman allowed to operate the telescopes at the observatory, and she developed the system of stellar classification that is still used today: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Generations of students have learned to memorise the disorderly string of letters using the unfortunate phrase: “Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me”.

In 1912, Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered a pattern in the brightness of a group of pulsing stars called the Cepheid variables. This was an integral part of Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the Milky Way wasn’t the only galaxy, and that the universe was expanding. Some members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wanted to nominate Leavitt for the 1926 Nobel prize only to discover that she had died in 1921.

A Nobel prize really should have gone to English-born Cecilia Payne in 1925, for her discovery that hydrogen was the most abundant constituent of stars. It at least earned her the first PhD in astronomy that Harvard awarded to a woman, and in 1956 she was the first female to get a full professorship at the university.

“Human computers no longer measured stars, but helped calculate the path to the moon”

On 5 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first orbital satellite. By then, computers no longer simply took the measure of the stars, but were mathematicians, helping to calculate the path to the moon. Margot Lee Shetterly’s father was a NASA scientist for 40 years and worked at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. He told his daughter stories of the black female computers who did calculations for engineers while segregated from their white colleagues. Young Shetterly “knew so many African Americans working in science, math and engineering that I thought that’s just what black folks did”.

Hidden Figures tells their story. It’s an engaging read, and a film adaptation is already on general release in the US. Shetterly weaves together the personal and professional stories of a group of extraordinary women into an account of how they overcame race and gender barriers, while helping to win the space race.

“What black folks did”

“Mississippiitis” looms large – a term coined by The Chicago Defender newspaper at the time to capture the “disease of segregation, violence and oppression that plagued America like a chronic bout of consumption” and which was, for some, the reason the country had fallen behind the Soviets.

Shetterly celebrates the skills, achievements and tenacity of women like Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson as they helped launch rockets and humans into space.

In 1953, Vaughan was at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor of NASA, heading a department of black female computers. They were joined by Katherine Johnson, the woman who helped put John Glenn into orbit and mapped the trajectory for Apollo 11’s moon landing, among other firsts.

There’s an easy moral here: that Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” will only loom larger in our imaginations once we appreciate all the people – men and women – who got him there.